On Nigeria’s Democracy Day May 29 President Goodluck Jonathan called on Nigeria‘s security forces to wage a ‘total war ‘ against the terrorist group Boko Haram and put an end to the impunity of terrorism and insurgency. The call was long overdue but even then, it is still appreciated that it has at last been made, if only for the records.
More so as it is apparent that the military, amongst the security forces especially, is running out of excuses as well as ideas and stratagems to prosecute a war in a territory in which those who give it intelligence lure its forces into bloody ambushes by Boko Haram, making it look as if the famed Nigerian Army was an hostle army of occupation in its own territory in the North East, which is still a part of the territorial borders of our great nation.
Globally amongst world leaders this week, President Goodluck Jonathan was not alone in giving the marching orders to a security apparatus that seemed to be fiddling like the famed Emperor Nero of the Ancient Roman Empire, who famously fiddled while his capital Rome, was burning.
In Pakistan a woman was beaten to death, indeed she was stoned to death by her relatives because she married against the family wishes and Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif ordered immediate investigation and urgent submission of the report this week as the Police were said to be standing by as the mob killing was going by.
Which meant that the Police simply looked the other way as the crime was being committed because marriages are usually arranged by families in Pakistan and the Policemen who were in attendance outside the court house knew what they were doing and their excuse that they arrived after the crime had been committed did not jell with the Pakistani PM who has asked that those policemen around at the time be brought to book.
Unfortunately what happened in Pakistan happened before when a government Minister was gunned down for criticising the Taliban by a policeman in his security escort while his colleagues just looked on.
Similarly an Afghan Minister was beaten to death at the Airport in Kabul where pilgrims were waiting to be airlifted to Saudi Arabia just because some pilgrims had their flight delayed, not cancelled.
Someone identified the unfortunate Minister as he was to board a flight on official duty and the irate pilgrims beat him to death with no one coming to the victim’s aid. The brutality in Pakistan and Afghanistan were fatal for the victims but the ongoing one in Sudan which is also outrageous and barbaric is not, at least for now.
In that country a Sudanese woman of Ethiopian extraction was sentenced to death while pregnant for apostasy because she married a Christian and refused to divorce him which they said is against Islamic law in Sudan. The woman has delivered her baby while in prison custody this week with her first child, also an infant, and sentence is being delayed for two years to enable her take care of her baby. Which I find quite mind bogging in its cruelty and barbarity as all the world’s religion preach peace and mercy towards even enemies.
The plight of the Sudanese woman to me is very similar to those of the abducted 200 Nigerian girls in the grim custody of Boko Haram with the wicked and ominous threat that they will be sold off in marriage like merchandise dangling over their heads as Boko Haram taunts a civilised world with more murders on a daily basis in Nigeria’s North East.
Although Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan has drawn a line in the sand for Boko Haram for threatening the gains of democracy it is to another African nation that we must look for an example of a head on solution to contain terrorism, insurgency and the sort of cultural brutality and religious bigotry in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria mentioned before.
That nation is former Coloonel Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya where a retired general, Khalifa Haftar has taken up arms against terrorists and insurgents who he said had infiltrated government and the National Assembly of Libya. He accused the present Libyan government of being unable to contain terrorism thus being inept in maintaining the security and safety of life and property of Libyans generally. His call has been taken up by similar minded secular Libyans and Islamic insurgents like our own Boko Haram are being attacked all over Libya to bring sanity to the government and administration of that nation.
The general has been branded a rebel by the government in Tripoli but he remained undeterred and has called for a postponement of elections due on June 25 saying that time is not conducive for this as the augean stable of Libya’s murky, bloody insurgency and terrorism has to be sanitised by force, first and foremost.
The government in Libya has however said the elections must go on. Meanwhile the Islamist insurgents under attack by the retired general warned the US not to intervene while the US has asked its citizens in oil rich Benghazi east of Libya, where a US ambassador was killed recently, to leave the area because it was unstable in terms of security. The Islamist Insurgents on their part have warned that the US should not intervene in Libya as the consequence of such would be worse than what the US saw in Somalia and Iraq.
Some critics have said the retired general could be a CIA agent as he fled and lived in the US when he quarrelled with the late Muammar Gaddafi. To me however his actions and motives are salutary and patriotic as he seemed focussed on achieving the stability and security of the Libyan state which has been elusive to the present government in Tripoli which so far has not been able to establish its legitimacy and relevance by containing the sanguinary and bloody insurgency of Libya’s many volatile and bloody Islamic insurgent militia.
What the Libyan government should have done is to find common ground with the retired general who is fighting the for the government in a critical power vacuum created by the ineptitude and weakness of the government in Tripoli. Similarly the PDP government in Nigeria should find common ground with the opposition APC in fighting Nigeria’s Islamic Insurgency which is what Boko Haram truly is.
Instead, a spokesman of the ruling party reportedly said that the demonstrations on the abducted Chibok girls was being orchestrated by the APC all over the nation. Which to me means that the PDP is directly giving kudos to APC although that was not intended.
Any party that is involved in any demonstration on the abducted Chibok girls should be commended and saluted for such a patriotic gesture.
That the ruling party should blame the APC for this means that the PDP is not involved in the demonstrations to bring our girls back and that is simply unpatriotic as the issue of the missing Chibok girls transcends politics and the ruling party should have joined APC in such a national assignment for the overall public good on the missing girls Certainly the PDP spokesman missed the point on the demonstrations and has only succeeded in portraying his party in very bad light on the demonstrations over the Chibok girls.
In addition it was reported that APC was organising demonstrations because it was in power in the three North East states namely Adamawa, Yobe and Borno which are under emergency rule.
Again that allegation missed the point. It is normal for the opposition to do what it was alleged to have done because that was the duty of a responsive and responsible political party in any such environment. It is also the duty of the government in power in Abuja to compliment such effort to show that it has not washed its hands off the missing Chibok girls or to quell rumours that it is just paying lip service to global and local efforts to find the missing Chibok girls.
Such cooperation with the APC would have been selfless and civil on the part of the PDP and would have lent more credibility to the subsequent, new found courage of the Commander in Chief, the ruling party’s leader in declaring total war on Boko Haram. Instead of the hollow, rumbling thunder of silence, gloom nonchalance and uncertainty which greeted the threat, locally and globally especially on the issue of the missing 200 Nigerian Chibok girls.
